“But Is It Art?” – Why We’re Still Asking the Same Question Warhol Forced on Us

"From Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes to provocative dung-splattered madonnas, in today's art world many strange, even shocking, things are put on display. This often leads exasperated viewers to exclaim--is this really art?"

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JULY 8, 2012

So begins the description of Cynthia Freeland's 2002 book on art theory at Amazon.com. The title says it all: But Is It Art? An Introduction to Art Theory. Her book is a stimulating read as the author attempts, in layman's terms, to help readers come to grips with how challenging it is to define why this is art and that isn't.

It's a problem that art students wrestle with and the public ignores, until their home town spends a quarter-million dollars on a sculpture that to taxpayers looks like an unhewn 300-ton boulder. 

The author begins with the shock artists. Why there is so much of blood in art today. By today, I mean the contemporary art scene of past few decades. Why would an HIV-positive artist hang rags dripping with blood over an audience that came to his show? Why would an artist make a movie of himself cutting off his penis one inch at a time? How is that artists feel that shock value is a necessary requirement for becoming noticed as an artist? 

Freeland cites John Dewey's 1934 explanation here: “Industry has been mechanized and an artist cannot work mechanically for mass production… “ For artists their work is self-expression. “In order not to cater to the trend of economic forces, they often feel obliged to exaggerate their separateness to the point of eccentricity.” (Art as Experience)

Does this reference to Dewey hold up, though? The community we live in here in Northern Minnesota is primarily service industry jobs. Or medical. Even in the manufacturing realm the majority of employees probably work in accounting and customer service, not production. I really don't think artists are artists as a reaction to mechanization and mass production. In fact, what I see today when I walk through the galleries and art fairs is the incorporation of mass production into the arts like never before with giclee reproductions and other print technologies taking artist's singular expressions and making them available by the hundreds.

As far as the use of blood by artists goes, Freeland notes that historically there has been a lot of blood shed within the context of religious rituals throughout human history. Mayans cut out still-beating hearts, the Greeks and Romans had their bloody rituals, and the roots of Judeo-Christian faith involve the shedding of blood. In fact, if you really stopped to contemplate some of the scenes that took place in the Tabernacle, you might even get ill at the quantities of blood and burnt offerings and the smells. No wonder they burned so much incense.

Freeland points out that when artists use blood it is shocking to us because it has been divorced from its ritual uses and therefore simply become something disturbing. This still doesn't explain why artists would use urine, semen and elephant dung. And in the back of my mind I can't help wondering, "What does your mother think of that?"

But then again, how much of this is really going on in the arts? I have been to countless art fairs, galleries and museums. I have never seen dung or feces displayed or urine or real blood, though at the Steampunk show this spring someone was carrying a vial of what he claimed to be wolf's blood. It fit the context of a role he was playing and most of us knew it wasn't real. And in our red-themed Red Interactive show last year, I heard at least two people comment that they were pleasantly surprised by the absence of blood or violence.

The book does a good job of raising all the right questions though and shows how the "big question" has no easy answer. As she points out Matisse was once described by the critics as a "wild beast" and anyone who knows his work would find this laughable today. Warhol's Brillo boxes and the Pop Art movement received the same brickbats.

Ivan Gaskill's review of Freeland's book at aesthetics-online.org begins by stating just how difficult this kind of undertaking really is, attempting to reach readers who are uninformed about art history and philosophy without addressing them in a condescending way. Despite the book's short-comings I recommend the book to all who are even semi-interested in engaging the arts today, whether artist, collector or just one of the many friends of the arts who simply go to shows to see what's new. It will give you things to think about, and maybe even answer a few questions you've wondered about. And if it raises still more questions, all the better. It will give us something to talk about when I run into you at the next art opening.

* * * 

What Was Warhol's Influence on Dylan?

e-Interpretation May 2012 from the "Screen Test"

Dylan's intersection with Andy Warhol seems to have been inevitable. The emerging icon and established icon were both inhabitants of what was then the cultural center of the world.

The Screen Test  
Bob Dylan's encounter with Andy Warhol's camera, known as the "Screen Test," was a brief but iconic moment in both their careers and in the broader context of 1960s pop culture.

Andy Warhol created hundreds of "Screen Tests" during the 1960s. These were short, silent, black-and-white film portraits of various individuals, usually lasting around three r four minutes each. Warhol used his 16mm Bolex camera to capture his subjects, often celebrities and friends, in a fixed frame with minimal direction.

If you go to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh you can see the setup and actually  participate in your "Screen Test."

Warhol's Screen Tests were not scripted or directed in the traditional sense. Instead, they captured unguarded moments and subtle nuances of the subjects' personalities. 

In the case of Bob Dylan, he visited Warhol's studio, known as The Factory, in 1965. The encounter resulted in a Screen Test session where Dylan was filmed by Warhol. During the session, Dylan exhibited his characteristic enigmatic persona, staring into the camera with his trademark inscrutable expression. The film captures Dylan's face in close-up, allowing viewers to study his features in detail. Some say Dylan was just being Dylan whereas others suggest that he was very uncomfortable.

One of the features of Warhol's persona was the manner in which his personal life remained shrouded in mystery, unavailable to the public till the day he died. This air of mystery created an allure of sorts, not unlike the private spaces Dylan has maintained over the years.

Warhol's observations about pop culture were pointed, not vapid. Dylan's work in the Sixties was equally pointed, right on target and so direct that it was sensationally influential. 

Related Link

The Warhol Museum

Warhol -- A Poem

Throwback Thursday: Basquiat, Revisited

Talented? Yes. Exploited? Yes. Role model? No. Tragedy? Yes.

 

Jean-Michel Basquiat is to art what Jimi Hendrix was to music. Rare, talented, original, producing remarkable work, and dead by age 27, by his own self-destructive instability. I first heard of him through the film Basquiat, starring notables Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken and David Bowie. Something about the film was off-putting at the time I began watching it and I turned it off in about twenty minutes. But the name stuck.

As a regular reader of the ArtDaily Newsletter, the recurring themes remind you of who and what are important in the art scene. Sotheby's, Museums of Modern Art, Picasso and Warhol all receive their due portions. And then there's Basquiat. Black. Puerto Rican. Fifteen year old runaway. Graffiti artist who lived hard, died of a heroin overdose like his heroes.

I have been reading Phoebe Hoban's uncomplimentary and thoroughly researched bio called Basquiat: A Quick Killing In Art. I say "uncomplimentary" because it is essentially an honest telling of his life and of those who exploited him. There are a lot of not so pretty pictures in the mix. The book opens with his overdose, an acute mix of heroin and cocaine. At the time he claims to have been doing up to one hundred bags of heroin a day.

In order to properly shed light on a life, one must see the context of that life as well, and Hoban's work is equally devoted to shedding light on the New York art scene. Beneath all the glam is "a pressure-cooker art scene where quantity matters more than quality, aggressive art dealers push prices through the roof, avaricious new collectors speculate wildly, auction houses create instant inflation, and the media magnifies the entire circus through a hyperbolic lens."

Hoban goes on to write that "Basquiat's brief life was a little bang that attracted its own temporary universe of powerful planets, whose orbits were in every way more constant than his own."

"The players who instantly recognized the phenomenon of Jean-Michael Basquiat and knew how to market it were older, more cynical, and ultimately easier to analyze than the lonely, alienated, and disenfranchised artist whose constant need to produce -- out of his own untrammeled creativity, deep-seated desire for approval, and insatiable demand for the cash that would buy him drugs -- became their ready source of profit."

Sound like the troubled street walkers who put out only to have money for another fix. Except the latter are simply used, whereas Basquiat's name has been elevated to the theater marquis, his paintings worth millions each.

His story again raises questions. What gives art its value? If the life is ugly and the work is beautiful, is it beautiful art? If Basquiat had had a religious conversion, survived the drug scene, repudiated Warhol and stopped "playing the art dealers' games" would his work be worth less today? If Basquiat had ceased being a sexually-charged vagabond infecting women with VD, settled into a monogamous relationship, raised a family and made art for twenty five more years, would they have made a major film about him, canonizing his free spirited "life without boundaries"?

Let me say here that I think his paintings are incredible. I enjoy the vibrant colors, the bold statements, the scope of his work. If he had simply been a middle class art major and produced the same paintings, would he have been so lionized?

I remember reading about creative people who were afraid to get therapy because they somehow tied their creative achievements to their unbalanced, inwardly disturbed state-of-mind. Where does this idea come from that creativity and madness go hand-in-hand?

 

Related Links
Was Robert Hughes Right About Basquiat?

Andy Warhol's Elephant in the (Basquiat) Rooom

Andy Warhol's Elephant in the (Basquiat) Room

Thursday afternoon I was able to make time for the Andy Warhol Museum while in Pittsburgh. The Pirates were playing at Heinz Stadium as I passed through the heart of the city. Finding a parking spot was easily achieved and I was soon inside, purchasing a ticket at the reception area. Tickets are half price for seniors, which turned out to be an unexpected perk, more than covering the cost of parking.

As noted in yesterday's post, the layout of the seven-story museum is chronological. You begin at the top and work your way down. Each level unfolds a more developed aspect of Andy Warhol's career explorations, from ad agency commercial illustration/design to Pop Art and screen printing, fascination with celebrities, film making and even journalism. And yes, there is a room dedicated to the Andy Warhol Screen Test in which museum-goers can also do a screen test.

This blog post is devoted to the Elephant here pictured, which stands on a small pedestal in the Warhol-Basquiat Gallery. It's been famously observed that the two artists did a lot of collaboration and the results were often dramatic. It would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall as these two created the works here.

When I entered the space, I initially scanned, then panned, the elephant. My eyes were drawn to the Warhol-Basquiat collaborations, bold and brassy, dramatic and uninhibited.

After circling the perimeter of the room, engaging each of the pieces (most of them mixed media) I returned to the elephant, and upon noticing the falling man pattern that spilled over the paper mache creature, I seemed to take more pleasure in the piece. It wasn't just a zebra-striped endangered creature.

As for the subject matter, Warhol had in 1983 produced a series of prints featuring 10 endangered species for Ron and Freyda Feldman. In other words, the sculpture was not unrelated to a theme he'd already shown interest in.

"Elephant" (Side view)

Here are a couple of the Warhol/Basquiat pieces that were hanging in this room.

Collaboration (Chairs/African)

Collaboration (Year of the Rat, Rodent (TM))

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Engage it.

Related Links
Basquiat and Warhol: Exploitative or even-handed relationship?
Was Robert Hughes Right About Basquiat?
Warhol's Elephant 293

Tech Tuesday: Dali Is Back!

If you watched the Super Bowl you most likely saw the unusual ad featuring Andy Warhol eating a Whopper. I was on the phone with my brother at the time and he said, "Is that Andy Warhol?"

I replied, "No, he's been dead nearly 30 years. It's just a look alike."

Silly me. It was indeed Andy Warhol. Like, wow.

This morning's The Drum (an eNewsletter devoted to marketing) has a related story about the re-appearance of of another internationally famous artist, Salvador Dali. Unlike the Warhol bit, the Dali Museum has worked with the ad agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners to create an AI deepfake Dali, a computer generated resurrection, drawn from analysis of footage and writings, for the purpose of showcasing The Dali Museum.

For nearly a dozen years I flew to Tampa to help drive my mom back North after doing her winter snowbird thing there. One several of those trips I took advantage of the opportunity to visit the Tampa Museum of Art, the St Petersburg Art District or the Dali Museum.

Dali, perhaps one of the three most well-known artists of the 20th Century, had been a strong source of inspiration for me when I was a young art student. I'd often intended to see the fabulous Dali collection when it was in Cleveland, and only later delighted to discover it was now housed here in Florida.

Like the art itself, the architectural design of the museum is a worthy complement to the life of Dali. If you've never been, you owe it to yourself to make time for this treasure if you're ever in the vicinity.

Now, not only does his work live on, but he himself will live on in his own inimitable way.

Read Anatomy of a deepfake: how Salvador Dalí was brought back to life

Related Links
Dali Steps Out
Dali Museum More Striking Than Ever
Warhol Revisited
Warhol and Lichtenstein

Photos created using a Salvador Dali die-cut card purchased at the Dali Museum. 

Local Art Seen: Pop Evolution Exhibit at the Tweed Is Worth Writing Home About

"Turning a Blind Eye" by Jerry Ott

"I am a deeply superficial person." --Andy Warhol

Sixties Pop had come of age when I was becoming an art student at Ohio University and, to be honest, I didn't like it. At the time I was immersed in the painterliness of the abstract expressionists and modern impressionists. Dada and surrealism captured my imagination, and Warhol's screen printed gaudiness did not. And I especially hated Lichtenstein's blown-up cartoon panels.

Despite my own feelings about the movement, which originated in New York with the likes of Andy Warhol (who I did feel was doing interesting things) and Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and James Rosenquist, the movement was highly influential, opening up new terrain for young artists and altering the landscape significantly by once again forcing the question, "What is art?"

All this to say that there is an exciting new exhibit in the Special Exhibitions Gallery at the Tweed Museum of Art through the end of March. The show is titled Pop Evolution, with works curated from the Tweed's permanent collection.

"Truck" by Warhol

What's impressive about the Tweed show is that it shows how widespread the Pop Art influence became. The superstars of this movement may have been the ones with top billing in New York, but the streaming colorwheel of their influence flowed everywhere. The ubiquitous Andy Warhol may have been the ringleader, but he hardly acted alone. Artists like Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg and Larry Rivers may have helped pave the way by knocking down some of the fences, but art wanted to be free... free from constraints, and to a large extent free from the galleries. (Warhol's art today is hardly free, though. Van Gogh, Picasso and Warhol works are among the most expensive a billionaire collector can own.)

When one reads about Pop Art today, the art history books make reference to the subject matter being one of its hallmarks. That is, instead of being about important subjects, the lens of the artists' eye was focused on the mundane, the ordinary, and in the case of soup cans or Brillo boxes, commodities. This later led eventually to installation-type shows that the general public would have yet greater difficulty appreciating or understanding. At least Warhol's Marilyn was interesting, even if gaudy. But what does one make of a dozen railroad ties lying in the middle of a gallery space?

"Love Cross" by Robert Indiana

Two pieces by Mildred Howard on collaged found papers.

"Sitting Bull" by S. Patricia McMahon

The dada movement that preceded Pop was anti-art and anti-capitalist. Andy Warhol emerged from an ad agency background that had Capitalism written all over it. In some ways Madison Avenue and Warhol's Factory were two peas in a pod.

Pop Art was in many respects a mirror of what was happening in the broader culture as values of all kinds were being brought into question. Here are some links about Pop Art that you may find informative:
What Is Pop Art?
Pop Art -- The Art of Popular Culture
The Emergence and Evolution of the Pop Art Movement

Pop Evolution is just one reason to get up to the Tweed. There's plenty more to see in the museum's various galleries. If you have not been there in a while (on the UMD campus) then you owe it to yourself to find a way.

EdNote: Bill Shipley, who spent most of his career in the Big Apple art scene, will be giving a gallery talk about this exhibition on March 11, from 2-3 p.m.

Jerry Ott, "Turning a Blind Eye"

Art is exciting, and there's a lot of it happening here in the Twin Ports. This Thursday will be the closing reception to the Duluth Art Institute Member Show and opening for Carla Hamilton's Gezielt (Targeted) and Elizabeth Kuth's "Rooted Expression." Also on display will be the Emerging Photographers exhibit in the corridor gallery.

And this coming Saturday the DAI Art Film Series begins, eight art films with discussions afterwards. The first film is "Frida" with UMD's Jamie Ratliff leading the post-show discussion. The films begin at 10:00 a.m. at the Zinema. (Admission is $5)

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Engage it.

Throwback Thursday: Themes

When I began this blog in 2007 I decided that one way to set it apart would be to combine my writing with art that I created. As time when on the illustrations and paintings I'd been creating led one of my readers to suggest having an art show featuring the art. I'd not had an art show since college and since a space was offered I took him up on it. I titled the show First Hand Experiences. As it turns out I hung more that 120 pieces in that show, and even sold a few. Here is the blog post I wrote in July 2009 regarding the artwork displayed that month in Duluth's West End.

"A sincere artist is not one who makes a faithful attempt to put on canvas what is in front of him, but one who tries to create something which is, in itself, a living thing." ~William Dobell

A lot of people have asked me if my show has a theme, or what kind of art I do. It was always hard to answer that since my work goes in a lot of directions. Eventually, I came to answer that my paintings and drawings were "in the modernist style." It is not classical, baroque or art nouveau, nor is it realism, landscape or still life. I can't call it abstract because much of it is representational to some extent. Certainly the portraits of Lincoln and Sitting Bull are straight up portraits.

As for themes, we have a friend who does gnomes. And some people do flowers. In American art, the major themes might include scenes from everyday life, historical subjects, abstract art, landscapes. Jackson Pollock did the large splatter paintings which brought him fame and fortune in the modern art world. Warhol did screen printing with images from pop culture, creating iconic reproductions of Marilyn Monroe, electric chairs and soup cans.

Although the styles in this show vary, one can't help but notice upon deeper reflection that certain themes emerge. One of these is the theme of suffering. We live in a broken world. Pieces like Scars Remain and Chase Ends In Suicide show the chaos of our culture, and paintings like Grief and Sad Clown likewise show the personal impact this brokenness has.

Another theme, which may or may not be immediately recognized, is the underlying sense of the comic. I like making funny pictures, and also enjoy toying with people a little. My found art piece Tribute to DuChamp was intended to bring a wry smile to art connoisseurs, though I have now learned that the average person no longer knows who DuChamp was. Nearly everyone gets a kick out of The Great Escape, a small brush and ink drawing of a man crawling on hands and knees, a guilty expression on his face.

The most important thing to me is that people who visit the show take time to engage each piece, which might be an impossibility in light of the quantity. Someone once said that "the holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it." I can relate to that. I'm honored when people get drawn in, engage, interact. Too much of life is lived on the surface, and so it is that once in a while we need to get jarred, to be made to pause, to reflect... not only on the piece, but on that which is occurring within our selves.

Maybe I'm just trying to share a little about what I like to do when I get away from it all while others go fishing. Some people might just call it glorified doodling. For me, making art satisfies a need. Sharing what I've created, and seeing other people enjoy it, satisfies a second.

Have a great day! Hopefully the rain will have stopped when you walk from your cars to the show tonight.

Warhol -- A Poem

It doesn’t matter what the critics think, keep making more art. ~ Andy Warhol

The bon vivant
making naked remembrance
of a background shooting,
film and history intermixed
with oceans of grief
in an eerie replay of his childhood.

“The scars look pretty in a funny way.”

But wow, the narrative rises to meet
horror and reality in a crazy mixed media scheme
involving blood and fantasies, dream and tissue,
as if God had given a second chance.

But what does it all mean, this porous existence
expressed in a tired vision of decay?
And so it was, we reeled with the aftershocks
of the Sixties.

Up to his sleeves in sleaze.

Amid the portraits and lavish commissions
he buried himself in fortunes
and an expanding influence pressing outward
in all directions.

Indifferent portraits of Mao, Jackie, Marilyn,

the ubiquitous soup cans,
diffused with phenomenal intensity.
Portraits in a wired weird washout of wicked wildness,
inundated with ample iconography to create a sense
of mad genius pervading all.

A Charles Dickens of the pop art scene,
immersed, devoured, ever pouring out the work,
ever provocative, forever progressing, energetic,
splashing the world with tacky wonder.

                                                                          e.n -- 2008
* * * *  

Burden of the Public Eye

"There's something about the pace of life that makes it difficult to really slow down and assess where we're going and how we're doing on this journey called life." ~ Ed Young

There's something strange about the nature of "celebrity." Many young people dream of "making it" in the field of their dreams, but few really understand the hidden cost of being famous. It might be fun at first. But when you read between the lines of many stories, you see that the mystique is also a burden.

In his biography, Bob Dylan talks about the pre-eminent need to maintain a “normal” family somewhere away from the public eye. The task took a toll on his first marriage. Some Dylan observers even went so far as to speculate that his famous motorcycle accident in the Sixties was staged as a mechanism for getting him out of the public eye for a spell, some time to slow down and assess.

This past weekend, I have been introduced to the almost incredible notion that Amelia Earhart, the first woman pilot to fly across the Atlantic, did not die in her attempt to be the first to fly solo around-the-world in 1937… that in fact it was a means for her to escape the public eye and get her life back.

According to Robert Lookup’s “Highlights of Aviation History,” (Reader Weekly, May 8, 2003) Amelia Earhart’s disappearance over the Pacific in her Lockheed Electra remains one of the significant events of first half of the century.

The idea of celebrity did not begin with Warhol. Warhol just noticed the phenomenon and used his art to highlight this tendency to elevate people to mythical stature.

In writing last week about fads (The Madness of Crowds, July 3) I became keenly aware of the passion for celebrity that was even at that time being generated by the power of emerging media. Charles Lindbergh, in his epic 1927 trans-Atlantic crossing, became ultra-celebrated. And the consequences of that celebrity were ultimately dark. Five years later, his twenty month old son was kidnapped and brutally murdered in what newspapers called “The Crime of the Century.”

Did Amelia Earhart begin to become concerned about her own rising celebrity, her own lack of a private life, her own loss of control over her future? There has always been a measure of ambiguity over the details of her disappearance. Indeed, the event ultimately succeeded in removing her from the public eye. But what really happened? This website offers the following surprising answer:

The truth is, Amelia Earhart did not vanish… at all. Rather, she was laid low after she was reported missing, changed her name, and adjacent to the WWII era she resurfaced in the United States to live out the rest of her life in basic anonymity.

In 2009 a Hollywood film starring Hillary Swank will capture pop attention, but will there be kernels of truth in this story? Or will it add more fog than illumination?

My initial suspicion is that the Earhart story is not yet over.

* * * *
EdNote: This blog entry was written in July 2008. The burden of celebrity is something many have wrestled with. It's the downside of fame. What do you think?

Sly Stallone the Painter and Other Celebrity Art

"Mask" by Jonathan Winters

The Sylvester Stallone story I remember most was one I heard on Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story about two decades ago. Essentially it was the story of a dock worker who labored all day and wrote Hollywood screenplays at night. After having written ten movie scripts, all rejected, he decided to create a character whose singular attribute was that he never gave up. This eleventh screenplay, of course, ended up as the first of many Rocky films and a career in Hollywood.

What I liked about the story was that Stallone had a day job but made sacrifices to be a writer by night as if to say, "Follow your passion. You never know where it will lead."

To my surprise, Stallone has had another passion this past half century. He wanted to be an artist. In fact, he has been painting an making art all through his career in Hollywood. In fact, if you happen to be in Russia during the next two weeks, you may want to visit The Russian Museum to see his current show there.

I stumbled upon the Stallone-as-Artist connection by means of website called Pop Life Art that featured the artist connections of celebrities. What sent me on my quest was Bob Dylan's Drawn Blank Series which was released this year. Years ago I'd already interviewed Jonathan Winters and Kurt Vonnegut as artists. I knew that John Lennon liked to draw and Ron Wood of the Stones was a painter. Who else were we familiar with who had a secret life as an artist?

Lorrie Davis, host of the Pop Life Art website has assembled an impressive list that includes links to numerous household names including Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Grace Slick, Leonard Nimoy, Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Johnny Depp, Viggo Mortenson, Edward Kennedy and more.

The current show of Bob Dylan's sculptures -- Mood Swings at the Halcyon in London -- received mixed reviews from art critics. The suggestion was that a great performer can't be a great artist, that his fame should not interfere with the evaluation of his art.

This raises issues that would be worth discussing at greater length sometime. What makes art significant? How does one artist receive critical acclaim to the extent that his work is worth millions, whereas another's works only sell for ten thousand?

Jonathan Winters said that a woman was once critical of his $25,000 price tag on one of his paintings. "How can that painting be worth $25,000?" He replied, "Because it has my signature on it. If it said 'Red Skelton' it would be worth $40,000."

Is it fame that gives artists' work value? A Jackson Pollock original is worth millions. An identical canvas by an unknown student would be hard-pressed to find a wall to hang it on.

Is it the approval of critics that makes a work important? The endorsements of certain critics are what have made many artists famous. This "fame" increases their value. And when they get really famous, if they can do this within their lifetimes like Warhol and Dali, then they can also be celebrities.

What do you think?

Warhol Revisited

It doesn’t matter what the critics think, keep making more art. ~ Andy Warhol

The bon vivant
making naked remembrance
of a background shooting,
film and history intermixed
with oceans of grief
in an eerie replay of his childhood.

“The scars look pretty in a funny way.”

But wow, the narrative rises to meet
horror and reality in a crazy mixed media scheme
involving blood and fantasies, dream and tissue,
as if God had given a second chance.

But what does it all mean, this porous existence
expressed in a tired vision of decay?
And so it was, we reeled with the aftershocks
of the Sixties.

Up to his sleeves in sleaze.

Amid the portraits and lavish commissions
he buried himself in fortunes
and an expanding influence pressing outward
in all directions.

Indifferent portraits of Mao, Jackie, Marilyn,

the ubiquitous soup cans,
diffused with phenomenal intensity.
Portraits in a wired weird washout of wicked wildness,
inundated with ample iconography to create a sense
of mad genius pervading all.

A Charles Dickens of the pop art scene,
immersed, devoured, ever pouring out the work,
ever provocative, forever progressing, energetic,
splashing the world with tacky wonder.

Talking Art with the Tweed's Bill Shipley

 Beginning the first Tuesday of October the Tweed Museum initiated a new program called Tweevenings in which guest speakers would discuss works from the Tweed collection and help the public gain a greater sense of art appreciation. Bill Shipley, who spent his career in the midst of the burgeoning New York arts scene from 1974 into the 21st century, was the presenter that first Tweed evening, discussing a sculptural aluminum relief by abstract artist Charles Biederman called “Redwing #29.” This was my first encounter with Mr. Shipley, and I’ve already concluded he is both a rich resource and welcome addition to our arts community.

EN: You had a friend who had a studio at a place where Hans Hoffman once had his studio. What was it like for a young Midwestern art student to be living in the heart of the New York art scene?

BS: When I think of moving from the Midwest to New York I remembered visiting the city many times before moving there. Once you live there however it is a very different place and you find that your neighborhood is a little like a small town within the scale of Manhattan. It was like that in the East Village and on Sullivan Street where I first lived. My next door neighbor was Marcia Tucker but I didn't know who she was until later when the New Museum got going. I had friends who worked for her in the early days.

St. Mark's Church in the Bowery was a vital part of the art and literary scene in those days. My apartment was almost across the street from it and when it burned badly we all mourned the loss. It was rebuilt but never quite the same after. And the neighborhood changed as New York University took over more blocks. Always though the artists led the way for the development and gentrification of the surrounding blocks and I would say that the biggest changes that I witnessed in the New York art world came from artists and galleries who were pioneers in SoHo and Lower Broadway and later in Chelsea.

EN: You had the privilege of being in the center of the New York art scene right after the Pop Art revolution had shattered all the rules. In what ways did the art world change over the thirty years you were there?

BS: In the 1970's and 1980's I could visit every single gallery in New York at least once in the art season. I would go to SoHo on Friday afternoons and then Madison Avenue and 57th street galleries on Saturdays. When I left the city in 2000 it would have been an impossible task. By then Chelsea alone had over 300 or more galleries. I also saw the development of what I call museum level galleries like Gagosian and Pace. Many dealers could open a gallery to represent small niches in the art market and find it profitable. Galleries devoted to just one part of the history of photography are a good example of this.

In Minneapolis, especially in the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District and the Northrup King Seed Building, similar things are happening now. In April I had my first show in a commercial gallery there at Carbon Chroma Gallery. Right now Steve Sugarman at Gallery 13 at 811 LaSalle in downtown Minneapolis has a few of my recent paintings. They are acrylic works on an abstract landscape theme - horizons and sky ideas mostly inspired by Lake Superior's variable atmosphere.

The Tweed Museum of Art is my second "home" so to speak as I continue to give tours of the museum collection. I have also taught classes on art history and the history of the Tweed Collection for University seniors at UMD. I hope that the students I meet now remember me as a mentor and fellow artist in the same way that I was helped by Myron Stout and Jack Tworkov and Judith Rothschild when I was starting out. The artists from Provincetown continue to inspire me now – from some forty years ago. Many other artists from that time I did not know personally but their presence nonetheless kept me going and kept me working and re-working my pictures. I can now look back on what I was living for and for what I still see ahead of me.

EN: Why is it important for us to support the arts as a community? 

BS: It is troubling that a question like that should even be asked in our society. A civilization and a country is defined by its laws and its art. No way to get around it. For a long time I have thought that art history should be part of a school's core curriculum -- from primary school age onward. What is really awful is that too often a school cuts art and music and theatre and dance and writing and poetry completely, or relegates it to an after-school program. No excuse for that.

Art was as central to the life of the students at the private school where I taught in New York as it is to New York City itself. As educators we make a big mistake in not realizing how crucial art is to a child's development at every age. The emphasis lately on testing and math and science is very short-sighted to say the least. The "will" to make something, to build something, to paint something or write something is at the heart and soul of every one of us. We can decide to support it or not but the consequences in both situations are real and tangible, for better or worse.

EN: Your time in New York overlapped Basquiat's rise to significance and sudden end. You mentioned crossing paths with Warhol on more than a few occasions. What's your take on Basquiat?

BS: I was not a part of Andy Warhol's inner circle but I knew people who were. At a lavish party in the downtown loft of the artist Arman and his wife Corice I noticed two large portraits of Mr. Arman and his wife painted by Warhol. My last sighting of Warhol just before his death was at a soda fountain coffee shop place just off Astor Place. As I walked by I saw him sitting by himself at a table by the window eating a large ice cream sundae. As for Basquiat (who was later mentored by Warhol) I always think of the importance of having children in museums at early ages because Basquiat literally grew up inside the Brooklyn Museum. But very talented young artists often fall into traps they cannot get out of and it takes their life way too early.

EN: Thank you, Bill. And it's good to hear that you're still very active in your studio. Keep it going.

Mad Men: More Than Meets the Eye

When Pop Art swept through the art scene in the Sixties, I didn't get it. A lot of other people didn't get it. In retrospect, Andy Warhol understood the world he lived in far better than most of us who were simply immersed in it, or viscerally reacting against it.

Warhol once pointed out, "It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it."

In the preface of her book Mad Men on the Couch, Dr. Stephanie Newman writes, "What Warhol meant was that movies not only reflect major social trends and changes; they also shape cultural norms and expectations. Movie and television stars become the avatars of fashion and style, the messengers of ethics and morality.

"And TVs powerful effect continues today."

When Mad Men popped onto the cultural landscape a few years back I was not a television watcher, though occasionally I've dabbled here and there for the purpose of keeping my finger on the pulse of what people were being moved by. The notion of obtaining box sets of complete seasons of your favorite shows was a foreign concept when we were kids. Today, you can obtain collections of every episode of Perry Mason or Lost. And for the record, I have seen all the Perry Mason shows again, and lost myself in the first five seasons of Mad Men.

Mad Men was a special challenge because I practically hated a couple of the characters and didn't want to be around them when they showed up in a scene. At the bidding of a friend I persisted because he said so-and-so isn't such a jerk after the first season, etc.

Being an ad man, what fascinated me about the show was its realistic portrayal of the problem solving aspect of the advertising game and how the agencies provide real services to oftentimes clueless clients. The show's widespread popularity is driven by the manner in which it re-creates the Sixties, mirroring the values, styles and events of that time. The screenwriting is superb.

Newman's book takes each of the characters from the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and has them lie on the couch to be analyzed. We see what's beneath the surface in Don Draper the Mad Ave Marlboro Man, Betty Draper the Original Desperate Housewife, Peggy the Career Woman, Pete the Bulldog, Roger the Blue Blood, and Joan the Competent Sexpot. The book deals with the narcissism, racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and every other kind of ism... as does the show, actually.

Just for the fun of it, here's a brief peek at what the real Mad Men of the Sixties were producing for their clients.

Mad Men on the Couch by Dr. Stephanie Newman was published by Thomas Dunne Books, A Division of St. Martin's Press.

Studio Time with Artist Jen Dietrich

This is part two of my interview with Jen Dietrich, UMD art professor. In our initial communications she stated that a visit to her studio would be beneficial in understanding her current work. Indeed, the studio visit proved exceedingly helpful.

Jen Dietrich's Lakeside home gives her close proximity to the university where she teaches. Like many artists that I know, myself included, a portion of her garage has been converted into a studio. The tidy compact space is brightly lit, amplified by clean white walls. It gives the impression of being well insulated and tightly buttoned, a necessity for Northland artists who hope to also do four seasons in their art spaces.

Her current work focuses on feminism and NFL football in a manner that would otherwise be difficult to envision until you see it firsthand. Her baseball series consisted of male figures, but this current series is football players and coaches with female characters overlaid.

Dietrich showed her strong comprehension of the game that came in part from marrying a man who played football. She explained that there are both offensive and defensive players on a football team, a very different setup from baseball. “The offensive line is often more intelligent, protective and nurturing than the defense,” she noted. “The approach to the game by offense and defense is almost polar opposite. It’s such an interesting contrast because I never thought about it on that level.”

She mentioned some of the female athletes she knew growing up and how she had begun overlaying their images over these male icons, Darah Torres over Greg Nettles, for example. It was a way of feminizing male icons so to speak. Some of the paintings that I saw in progress at Dietrich’s studio included one of Mike Ditka who would be overlaid with Gloria Steinum and another of Bud Grant underneath Madeline Albright. It’s definitely an unexpected take on the national pastime.

During my visit, Dietrich made a number of interesting observations on various themes that we touched on. “The dialogue is what keeps art alive,” she said.

A little later we circled around one of the current trends of our time. “In post-modern times, the original is not valued as much due to digital reproduction… Not everyone is physically rubbing oil paint on surfaces but nearly everyone can do Photoshop.”

"How did your interest in film come about?" I asked. "And what prompted you to collaborate with Sarah Nitschke to form Underbelly Films?"

"The film we started in 2004, which has really pre-occupied Sarah and I. It was especially challenging being a single mom with three kids. (Dietrich is now four years married to a man from Iowa and the family has six children between them.) 

The film they produced is called Naked Vision. It's a documentary about the painter Philip Pearlstein. After watching the film I went online to find this summary at imdb.com. Ironic, imperturbable, mischievous and fascinating, Philip Pearlstein's controversial creative vision continues to drive him forward, upstream against time and art history. In depth interviews with famous art world figures, Chuck Close, Richard Armstrong, Robert Storr, Pearlstein and others, help to reveal what is behind the man and his paintings.

"One thing that really attracted me to Phillip was that he just wears beige. He's non-flamboyant, and productive," Dietrich stated.

He was also a friend of Andy Warhol's while in school in Pittsburgh and actually played a part in Warhol coming to New York. He was a little older than Andy, and Andy's mother felt better about her son venturing off to the Big Apple if the two went together.

Dietrich said the film direction was "quite fulfilling and a great example of pushing the envelope. (It had) all the components of a great tale-- Alaska, art world icons, 15 minutes of fame (literally), paying it forward and, of course, New York City.

"Sarah was my colleague at UMD. And in 2003 we attended a conference together in New York. The film's inception happened then."

It's apparent that Dietrich has a strong work ethic, and seemingly boundless energy. She is easy to engage as her mind is nimble and her stance toward people very open. It's easy to see why her students appreciate her instruction.

The images on this page are "works in progress" that reveal a bit of the process behind her vision. We'll look forward to the opportunity to see this new series once it reaches fruition. What you see here is not what you'll get.

Thank you, Jen, for your time and for opening up your space.

Kinkade, Elvis and American Conservatism

"Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art." ~Andy Warhol.

The recent passing of Thomas Kinkade brought to the surface a number of questions that in another context might make for a good discussion. Is a person a good artist because he has technical facility? Is a person a good artist because she is good at selling her work? Is the price people will pay for a piece a measure of its worth? What is the relationship between the artist's work and the way the artist lived?

According to the website Celebrity Networth, Thomas Kinkade was worth 70 million dollars while he was alive. His estate will no doubt increase in value since it is customary for artists' work to have great value after they die. He made this small fortune through a combination of talent, mass-production and American enterprise.

There are not a lot of artists who have become a household name. Picasso and Dali are two who crossed over into popular culture. Though not of their ilk in importance, Kinkade did succeed in creating a name for himself as a "Painter of Light" and something more. His Christian-themed art was beloved by the masses because, he says, God was guiding his brush and his life the last 20 years.* In a New York Times article he was quoted as boasting that he is a successful American artist because his works are in 1 of every 20 homes in America. 

I'm having a difficult time articulating what I want to say here. Maybe that there is something weird about the way liberals and conservatives line up behind people for reasons that have nothing to do with the art itself. For example, Last Temptation of Christ was a dumb film, but liberal critics praised it to the hilt. Martin Scorcese is a friend, but it didn't work as a film and to give it four stars was silly. Christian conservatives for the same reason (because of Thomas Kinkade's marketing) say his art is great when it is simply technical facility and sweet themes. And he was a Christian.

But the guy was not who he says he was. According to reports he was an alcoholic, a bully and was living with a younger woman instead of his wife of thirty years. According to this story in an LA Times blog the woman says he died happy. The Kincade estate would prefer his image be less tarnished so that his paintings maintain their value. (One of his originals flew up in price by over $200,000 after he died last month.)

I've hardly scratched the surface here as regard what I am internally wrestling with. In my mind are images of Elvis wrapping himself in an American flag, and of Elvis portraits painted on black velvet. And an Elvis mansion. And... somehow this is all wrapped in our fascination with the surface of things and what they stand for instead of thinking more deeply about what is really going on.


I'll be returning to this subject soon because it ties into another theme that I have had on my mind, the National Endowment for the Arts. I used to be agin' it and now I'm for it, more than ever.

Have a good weekend, friends.

*Kim Christenson, L.A. Times, Dark Portrait of a "Painter of Light" (Mar. 5, 2006)

Warhol

It doesn’t matter what the critics think, keep making more art. ~ Andy Warhol

The bon vivant
making naked remembrance
of a background shooting,
film and history intermixed
with oceans of grief
in an eerie replay of his childhood.

“The scars look pretty in a funny way.”

But wow, the narrative rises to meet
horror and reality in a crazy mixed media scheme
involving blood and fantasies, dream and tissue,
as if God had given a second chance.

But what does it all mean, this porous existence
expressed in a tired vision of decay?
And so it was, we reeled with the aftershocks
of the Sixties.

Up to his sleeves in sleaze.

Amid the portraits and lavish commissions
he buried himself in fortunes
and an expanding influence pressing outward
in all directions.

Indifferent portraits of Mao, Jackie, Marilyn,

the ubiquitous soup cans,
diffused with phenomenal intensity.
Portraits in a wired weird washout of wicked wildness,
inundated with ample iconography to create a sense
of mad genius pervading all.

A Charles Dickens of the pop art scene,
immersed, devoured, ever pouring out the work,
ever provocative, forever progressing, energetic,
splashing the world with tacky wonder.